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The Coca-Cola Company isn’t smiling about the latest effort to force labels on foods and beverages that contain genetically modified organisms – this time in Washington State. It’s on a long list of manufacturers that sell products using ingredients derived from either corn or soy, both of which are nearly impossible to source in the United States without using genetically modified crops. In fact, should Washington pass its ballot initiative 522 next week, good luck finding any processed foods or beverages in an Evergreen State grocery store that don’t have GMO warning labels. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo both are on a...

The left is in a frenzy over the American agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto and other agribusinesses that tinker with crop genetics. Is there any truth to their scare stories asserting that we’re being poisoned with “Frankenfood,” breeding new strains of superbugs and superpests? Genetically modified crops, known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms), have been used by American farmers since the mid-1990s in order to increase crop yields and reduce the use of pesticides. The FDA has approved their use. Today, 70-80 percent of grocery products in the U.S. include genetically engineered ingredients. In contrast, only 5 percent of the food...

American eaters love a good villain. Diets that focus on one clear bad guy have gotten traction even as the bad guy has changed: fat, carbohydrates, animal products, cooked food, gluten. And now Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco, is adding sugar to the list. His book "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease" makes the case that sugar is almost single-handedly responsible for Americans' excess weight and the illnesses that go with it. "Sugar is the biggest perpetrator of our current health crisis," says Lustig, blaming it...

Mice that could not make or metabolize the sugar gained less than normal mice. Mice lacking the ability to metabolize fructose don’t gain nearly as much weight as normal mice do, researchers report September 10 in Nature Communications. Fructose, which some people blame for the obesity epidemic and its related health crises (SN: 6/1/13, p. 22), shows up in high-fructose corn syrup and in table sugar, or sucrose. The body also makes home-grown fructose by modifying glucose in a process involving an enzyme called aldose reductase.

All those Pepsis and Cokes could be making a monster out of your little bundle of joy. New research shows kids who regularly drink soft drinks are more aggressive. Researchers from Columbia University, the University of Vermont and Harvard studied data on 3,000 five-year-old children from 20 U.S. cities. Their mothers reported the frequency of soft drink consumption and completed a behavioural assessment survey. Nearly half of the children (43%) drink at least one serving of soft drink a day, and 4% drink four or more. Even after taking into account other factors, such as family violence, kids who drink...

How activist misinformation wastes time, money, and harms AmericansDavulcuHealth activists, nutrition nannies, medical paternalists, and just plain old quacks regularly conjure up a variety of menaces that are supposedly damaging the health of Americans. Their scares ranging from the decades-long campaign against fluoridation to worries that saccharin causes cancer to the ongoing hysteria over biotech crops to fears of lead in lipstick. The campaigners’ usual “solution” is to demand that regulators ban the offending substance or practice. Here are five especially egregious examples.5. Americans should consume no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day, in order to reduce everybody's...

Our very first experience of exceptional sweetness—a dollop of buttercream frosting on a parent’s finger; a spoonful of strawberry ice cream instead of the usual puréed carrots—is a gustatory revelation that generally slips into the lacuna of early childhood. Sometimes, however, the moment of original sweetness is preserved. A YouTube video from February 2011 begins with baby Olivia staring at the camera, her face fixed in rapture and a trickle of vanilla ice cream on her cheek. When her brother Daniel brings the ice cream cone near her once more, she flaps her arms and arches her whole body to...

A Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center study on dietary fructose has provided more evidence of the potential for controversy when researchers target products affecting consumer spending and corporate profits. This time, researchers are on the receiving end of sharp criticism from the Corn Refiners Association after reporting that fructose rapidly caused liver damage even without weight gain with primates.The researchers acknowledged when they released the study results that the role of dietary fructose in the development of obesity and fatty liver diseases “remains controversial.” Researchers determined that over a six-week study period, liver damage more than doubled in the monkeys...

Tuesday June 25, 2013 (foodconsumer.org) -- A new report published in Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism suggests that eating foods or drinking beverages with fructose may increase risk of endothelial dysfunction, insulin resistance/diabetes mellitus type 2 and hypertension. Z. Khitan and D. H. Kim, the authors of the report, from Marshall University Joan Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, WV, USA say that uric acid resulting from uncontrolled fructose metabolism is the risk factor for metabolic syndrome and diabetes mellitus. What happens, according to the report, after fructose is ingested is that the sugar in the liver bypasses two highly...

The American Medical Association has officially recognized obesity as a disease, a move that could induce physicians to pay more attention to the condition and spur more insurers to pay for treatments...

(Phys.org) —A team of entomologists from the University of Illinois has found a possible link between the practice of feeding commercial honeybees high-fructose corn syrup and the collapse of honeybee colonies around the world. The team outlines their research and findings in a paper they've had published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers aren't suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is itself toxic to bees, instead, they say their findings indicate that by eating the replacement food instead of honey, the bees are not being exposed to other chemicals that help the bees fight off toxins,...

Food companies big and small are struggling to replace genetically modified ingredients with conventional ones. Pressure is growing to label products made from genetically modified organisms, or “G.M.O.” In Connecticut, Vermont and Maine, at least one chamber of the state legislature has approved bills that would require the labeling of foods that contain genetically modified ingredients, and similar legislation is pending in more than two dozen other states. This weekend, rallies were held around the globe against producers of genetically altered ingredients, and consumers are threatening to boycott products that are not labeled. And so, for many businesses, the pressing...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Protesters rallied in dozens of cities Saturday as part of a global protest against seed giant Monsanto and the genetically modified food it produces, organizers said. Organizers said "March Against Monsanto" protests were held in 52 countries and 436 cities, including Los Angeles where demonstrators waved signs that read "Real Food 4 Real People" and "Label GMOs, It's Our Right to Know."… The U.S. Senate this week overwhelmingly rejected a bill that would allow states to require labeling of genetically modified foods.

A new study may stimulate the old adage of respecting your elders; it says the general level of intelligence in the Western Hemisphere has declined since the Victorian Era. The study claims the IQ numbers are 14 points lower than from the 19th century. One of the authors of the study, Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, says the cause of the movement toward stupidity is that smarter women have fewer children while those of lower intelligence have more children. But Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at...

President Obama approved a temporary spending bill this week that averted a government shutdown but also riled a slew of groups that say one provision protects Monsanto and other makers of genetically modified seeds and crops from federal courts. The so-called Monsanto Protection Act essentially requires the Agriculture Department to approve the growing, harvesting and selling of such crops, even if the courts rule environmental studies are incomplete -- undermining the judicial review system and posing potential health risks, critics say.

Did you know that consumption of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the U.S. -- which can be found in a plethora of cookies, candies and fast-foods -- has increased by a a whopping 10,673 percent between 1970 and 2005? So reports the USDA Dietary Assessment of Major Trends in U.S. Food Consumption report. Are you one of millions, who, according to the USDA report, consume one-quarter of your calories from added sugars, most of which comes from high fructose corn syrup, as mercola.com pointed out? Meanwhile, have you heard about the a recent study, which reveals that a diet...

This is your brain on sugar—for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating. After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn’t register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found. It’s a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages,...

Countries using high-fructose corn syrup have diabetes rates 20 percent higher than countries that do not, a new international analysis finds. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in national food supplies around the world might help explain the rising rates of type 2 diabetes around the world, researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford report in the journal Global Public Health. After studying 42 countries, researchers found that those that use HFCS in their food supply had a 20 percent higher prevalence of diabetes than those that did not use HFCS, suggesting an association with diabetes independent...

A new study released this past week has once again linked the consumption of processed foods to health complications, giving food safety advocates even more cause for concern. The April 10th publication of the Clinical Epigenetics Journal reported a link between high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and autism in the United States. According to the study, the rise in autism rates "is not related to mercury exposure from fish, coal-fired power plants, thimerosal, or dental amalgam but instead to the consumption of HFCS.” The study, led by former FDA toxicologist and whistleblower Renee Dufault, found that a deficiency of zinc,...

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same. In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United...